The Passion of Henry James

Published: June 20, 2004

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Similarly, a visit from Henry's boyhood acquaintance Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. leads to recollections of his cousin, the pretty and spirited Minny Temple, whose early death traumatized not only James but many other young men of his circle, including Holmes and the Harvard jurist John Gray. By the 1890's, James had already reincarnated her as Isabel Archer in ''The Portrait of a Lady,'' and a decade later would summon her once again from the dead, even more powerfully, as Milly Theale in ''The Wings of the Dove.'' A post-Civil War idyll in the countryside, peopled by Minny and Henry and the other youths, is beautifully evoked by Toibin in the course of a long and richly detailed section of the book that captures the lost Minny -- surely one of the most important if unwitting muses of 19th-century fiction -- far better than any biographer has been able to do. Here again, we see the process by which sentimental memory is alchemized into art in James's ever-churning mind:

''During the time since Holmes's visit and in the midst of all his worry and suffering, his interest in the picture of a young American woman slowly dying, which he had noted down, had intensified. It was the story of a young woman with a large fortune on the threshold of a life that seemed boundless in its possibilities.''

And so ''The Master'' proceeds, wending its delicate way between the middle and end of the 19th century, offering rich, darting, almost impressionistic glimpses of the moments of James's life that made him the ''Master.'' The most extended, and most tragic, of these shimmering episodes is, inevitably, the flashback to James's friendship with the novelist Constance Fenimore Woolson. A grandniece of James Fenimore Cooper and a woman of great intelligence and uncommon independence of mind and habit, Woolson was in many ways James's most intimate friend; her suicide in 1894, in Venice, could well have been the result of his inability to respond to her desire for a greater intimacy. (She killed herself during a particularly bleak Venice winter after it became clear that James wasn't going to be joining her there, as he indicated he might.) As Colm Toibin's Henry James faces the 20th century, it is clear he must come to terms with the losses, and failures, of the 19th; the author's evocation of an artist confronting his inadequacies as a man is, for much of the novel, delicate, complex and moving.

''The Master'' is not, of course, a novel about just any man, but rather a novel about a figure from the past about whom we know an extraordinarily great deal, through both his own and others' memoirs, books and letters. As Toibin well knows, ventriloquizing the past is a dangerous affair for a novelist who wants to be taken seriously: just to remind you, he has an indignant Henry tell his supercilious and critical brother (who has suggested he write a novel about the Puritans) that he views ''the historical novel as tainted by a fatal cheapness.'' Toibin himself gets around this pitfall in two ways. First, he avoids the obvious trap of trying to make his Henry James sound Jamesian: to try to ''do'' James would inevitably end up sounding comical (see, for instance, Gore Vidal's hilarious sendup of James in his historical novel ''Empire''). From this novel's haunted and haunting first line -- ''Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead'' -- ''The Master'' is wholly of the present, and stylistically belongs to Toibin alone, who achieves a new level of terse economy both in his descriptive passages and particularly in the dialogue. Everything you need to know about James's disdain for Oscar Wilde (whom, predictably, he detested: a ''fatuous cad,'' he told Henry Adams's wife, Clover) is summed up in his remark about Wilde's mother, who was said to be jubilant about his trial: ''It is difficult to imagine him having a mother.''

The ''fatal cheapness'' of many historical novels lies in the way they show off their own hard-won verisimilitude, as overrich detail congests the narrative. Of meticulous detail ''The Master'' lacks none: nearly every page bears witness to a prodigious amount of research, from passing references to the appearances of James's room in Mrs. Curtis's palazzo, with its ''pompous painted ceiling and walls of ancient pale green damask slightly shredded and patched'' -- almost a verbatim quotation of James, as it happens -- to the way Henry complains to himself, after the failure of ''Guy Domville,'' that he'd failed to ''take the measure of the great flat foot of the public'' -- another verbatim quotation. And yet while this dazzling embedding of bona fide Jamesian nuggets throughout his narrative will delight James scholars, they never obtrude into the smooth and elegant flow of the novel's movement. (Toibin's major departure from the known facts is temporal: a number of events that occurred after 1900 are shepherded into the preceding decade.)

The deft wielding of the facts by (as it were) Toibin the journalist and critic would be mere window dressing without the acute psychological perceptiveness that informs the author's portrait of his subject. This intelligent sense of the bigger picture enables Toibin to come up with sensible solutions to some famous conundrums in James scholarship. I am not as persuaded as Toibin was by the assertion, in Sheldon M. Novick's 1996 biography, ''Henry James: The Young Master,'' that the young James had a homosexual affair with Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. when Holmes returned from the Civil War -- a scenario supported in Novick's book by a reading of the existing documentary evidence that has the same relationship to rigorous scholarship that ''A Sunday on La Grande Jatte'' does to high-resolution digital photographs. (Much hangs on a Freudian reading of an allusion to an ''obelisk'' that occurs in proximity to a description of the Holmes residence.)